i realized yesterday that for me, the tail end of big projects involves very little design work and lots of render / export / ship. a sentient being is only needed for the rather brief design fixes, but because i dunno how to automate the rest, i need to make the design, render it, open it in quicktime, export it as h264 to two different sizes, and then FTP each to the appropriate person. (the client gets the approval copy and the multimedia vendor gets the display copy).

instead of clicking the render button in AE, i want to click some kind of "publish" module, so that for every open composition it will ...

• figure out the appropriate file path names from the comp name

• find out if this comp has any audio layers turned on, if so choose an output module to render with 48khz/24 audio

• render the pristine lossless version of this comp

• open the resulting movie in quicktime

• export both a high res display copy and a low res approval copy (2 different settings)

• FTP the approval copy to the client

• FTP the display copy to their local multimedia vendor

• email both to let them know what was transferred

• phone me to wake me up so i can do some more work.

applescript or automator should be able to do most of this, as kees pointed out.

one difficulty is that i can't just send everything to a place called "renders". i need to extract the file names and their appropriate destinations from the AE comp names and the project folders they live in, so we could make sure the FTP transfers go to like-named directories on the remote systems. and if the appropriately named directory does not yet exist, the script needs make one. that's what i am doing now manually.

the other difficulty is linearity. i don't want to go through the whole script for each comp and only *then* start rendering the next comp. the render queue needs to be ongoing. i want them all to be running at the same time. as each render finishes, it should export, and as each export finishes it should ship -- even while the other comps are still rendering and exporting. i dunno what you call that -- multitasking, multi-threading?

i wish i knew some applescript smarty who could make this happen for me. i don't like wasting consciousness.

anyway i believe now all the promised deliverables have been delivered for project r07, except one last little thing the client thought of on sunday that might be a nice addition. extra mini-gig for me, hope to get it done by thursday.